


Sentimental Journey

by kittydesade



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-13
Updated: 2012-06-13
Packaged: 2017-11-07 16:06:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/432978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittydesade/pseuds/kittydesade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pepper and Steve discuss Tony Stark, New York City, and the Hour of the Wolf.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sentimental Journey

For the first month and a half even after the Chitauri left, Steve Rogers' life seemed to consist solely of crisis after crisis broken by a few hours sleep and the length of time it took to microwave a meal and bolt it down. Useful little boxes, those, he decided after Tony got tired of him looking wistfully at the kitchenette one late night of strategy and planning. He'd gotten up, gone over to the fridge, and within five minutes Steve had a hot meal ready to be eaten. Out of all the technological developments of the last sixty years or so, he decided, that was his favorite.

Computers were his second favorite. Much to Tony Stark's dismay, and his robot house's amusement. Not that Steve could argue against the usefulness of computers, but they were only as good as the information you put into them. And he couldn't deny that a computer could draw a map to specifications much more swiftly and precisely than a human hand, or calculate math problems, or identify one molecular compound from thousands. He and the robot Jarvis had discussions late into the night on the subject, usually while Tony was also occupying the artificial mind with the latest redesigns for his armored suit.

Even after the super serum, if someone had told him he'd be debating the merits of artificial intelligence and advanced calculating machines with one of said calculating machines, he would have called the notion absurd and crazy.

"Another, sir?" asked the intelligent machine.

Steve shook his head. Just because he couldn't get drunk anymore was no reason to overdo it, and he'd had a couple of beers at the bar even before he came back to the Stark building. "No, thank you." Then, as Dummy drooped and turned to go. "No, wait. Some water, please, would be nice? I think it's going to be a long night."

"You're going to confuse him," Pepper said from further back in the room. Steve straightened and turned, coming almost to full attention before he made himself relax. "Around here, a long night means more noise and, often, more beer."

She smiled, tolerant suffering with familiar affection, and he couldn't keep from smiling back. Even knowing Tony for only a couple of months he'd figured out that the man did actually care for Ms. Potts and his robot creations. Even if he hid it under layers of sarcasm and abuse. 

"Had a couple at the bar, ma'am." Steve shrugged. "Besides, we still have to go over the rest of the files Director Fury sent us, and we haven't even gotten to the report from Thor..."

She was nodding before he'd finished his sentence. "I know. Believe me, I know..." 

Steve's smile was crooked and tired, but real. "You know, I think you're the only one besides me who actually reads all of the reports?"

"That's what Tony has me for," she laughed, the same way she'd smiled before. "Just ask him." 

"He really trusts you a lot," Steve blurted. Half-blurted. It was a considered opinion, he just hadn't meant to express it out loud, not at this point. Pepper cocked her head at him and gave him her considering look, professional smile until she could figure out if that was a compliment to her or a slight against Tony. She didn't, he'd learned, tolerate undeserved insults to Tony Stark. 

"What makes you say that?"

Steve shrugged, gestured around. "He trusts you with all this. He hands over everything important to you because... I don't know, maybe he's afraid he'll screw it up? It's, um." Beautiful was the first word that came to mind, right now it was, but he didn't feel comfortable saying something like that to Ms. Potts. It sounded too much like passing judgment on her and Tony's relationship. "The truth is, it reminds me a lot of a friend of mine. Back home."

Where, back home meant, back in his own time. Pepper nodded, her expression softening into the same one everyone got when Steve talked about 'back home,' the pity and the delicacy, and the thought that maybe they shouldn't have brought it up. "I'm sorry," she started. Steve shook his head. 

"Don't be. I mean, yeah, it happened. I'm still getting used to..." one hand gestured around and out the windows at the rest of the city. "All this. It's brighter than I remember. A lot brighter," he laughed kind of sheepishly. The first few times he'd wandered out at night he felt like he should be wearing sunglasses, everything lit up in more colors than he'd expected were possible. He couldn't even see the sky, let alone the stars. 

"The wonders of neon."

He nodded. "When I was, um. Growing up, we didn't have so many colors."

"Is that a good thing or a bad thing?" Pepper laughed a little. Still delicate, but he thought it was more because he'd made her think about something particular. She started to explain when Jarvis interrupted. 

"In the past fifty years alone the number of colors available to neon tubing artists has more than tripled. After the Second World War..."

"Thank you, Jarvis, but I don't think we need a history lesson right now," Pepper interrupted. Steve flashed her a grateful little grimace, even though that section of R&D was far from anything he'd ever been involved in.

"It's, um." He rubbed his hand over the back of his neck, noting absently as he did so that it was time to visit the barber again. Already. "It's different. There's a lot of stuff about the city that's different. Everything's louder, it's less dirty, though," he added. "Believe it or not."

" _Less_ dirty?" she laughed. "I don't know if I would believe that."

"Well, you and Tony, you've been working on clean energy sources, right? _Clean_ energy," he grinned ruefully. "Believe me, you might not be able to appreciate the difference it makes, but if you find some other old-timers who were there when I was, they'll back me up." Not that he thought it was likely. And even if they could, someone else would have lived through the interim decades. But it was the thought that counted.

"Well, it's good to know we're helping." 

"You are helping." He couldn't say that enough, if only because he hadn't said it to Howard Stark when he had the chance. "You're making a difference. Not just with the Iron Man suits, with this, clean energy giving us all air to breathe that isn't... isn't full of smoke. Longer lives. Sponsoring new inventions, research, new technology through the expo, you're going back to what they used to be. Giving people a chance to make their dreams into realities. Giving people a chance to determine the shape of the future, not just the ones who were born lucky and rich, but anyone with an idea..." Steve blinked. "What?"

Pepper was shaking her head, grinning. "You. You're... unbelievable. Despite all this, despite all we've been through and everything we've seen, you still think we can change the world for the better."

Steve frowned. "Don't you?"

"No, I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just..." she sighed, and he had the feeling she wasn't looking at him, wasn't seeing _him_ anymore. "It's hard to keep up that kind of hope, sometimes." 

He wondered, every time someone said that to him, why they thought he was the bastion of wide-eyed idealism. Because he was the youngest, maybe. He'd also seen the kind of combat none of them could imagine. A harder world than most of them had seen. Maybe not, Steve corrected, shaking his head and deciding that discretion was the better part of tact, in this case. He knew about Tony's not-all-that-secret forays into war zones to make amends for what he felt he had done. He'd read the reports, which no one seemed to remember, about the places Bruce had been hiding in. Willfully ignored pits of human misery and poverty. 

"It's the war," he said abruptly, going to the window and looking out at the city, seeing the view from his old sixth-floor apartment instead. Pepper followed him, he heard her soft footsteps. "You get used to fighting. Not the enemy, I mean, we've all done a lot of that. You get used to fighting ... yourself. The idea that it can't be won, that it's hopeless. It follows you all the time, on the field, in prisoner camps. You get used to throwing yourself against it, because when you start to believe you can't win, that's when you're probably right."

Pepper's fingers pressed into the folders she was holding, tension lines rising into view around her eyes and mouth. Steve realized after a moment to think that she was probably thinking of Tony, because so much of what Tony did was now tied up in his image, his ego and aggressive confidence. He couldn't afford to be hopeless, either.

"I think you're better than the rest of us, that way."

He put an arm around her shoulders, because it seemed like the thing to do. "Nah. Just more used to it." Her reflection smiled in the glass of the window; he could see it now that a handful of the restaurant signs had winked out beneath them.

And they stood there for a while, Dummy hovering in the background and the quiet thrum of computers and other electronics in the background. Back in the day it would have been street sounds, his apartment and even his room on the base being less insulated from the outside world. Street sounds and, later, the sounds of scientists moving about in the lab and the rattling old hum of the refrigerator. But even the sounds were different now, all this focus on muting things so you could focus on your own thoughts. Sometimes Steve wanted to focus on other things.

"Where is Mr. Stark, anyway?" he wondered. Pepper shook her head, straightening enough that he felt more comfortable letting his arm drop as she pulled her professional face back on. 

"Probably out getting dinner, he was muttering something about craving pad thai earlier. That's this..." her fingers sprinkled imaginary spices over imaginary noodles.

Steve chuckled. "I know what pad thai is. You know, that's one thing that I don't think actually changed while I was, um. Asleep? You can still get just about any kind of food you could ever want, here. I mean, back when B--" 

Back when. Back when it had been him and Bucky, after school, on weekends, wandering around and hitting up this hole in the wall, that bodega, the greasy spoon over there. Picking up things he couldn't pronounce the names of, but they sure smelled good. And taking them back and between the two of them they had food for the next two days running. Even now, Steve could walk down to the street level and go to a couple neighborhoods that didn't look like they'd changed in the whole time he'd been gone. Sure, the restaurants had changed but the food was pretty much the same. Some of the places were owned and run by their grandchildren, now. 

It felt like he'd been stuck in his memories for ages. But it couldn't have been that long before Pepper nudged him to finish. 

"Back when Bucky was around," she finished for him instead, didn't ask. "I guess that makes sense. Port town, lots of immigration. That's one thing I really love about New York that you can't get almost anywhere else. Not as late, anyway," 

Steve nodded, still feeling the swell in his throat. It'd go away any day now. For a little while.

"Wolf gnawing at your heels?"

It was so out of place that he blinked out of his heartache, turned slightly to look at Pepper. "Excuse me?"

"That's what Natasha calls it. The hour of the wolf. It's supposed to be that time at two in the morning or something, when everything seems like it's at its worst, no matter what's actually going on. Everything could be going right for once, and it'd still feel like you're stuck in a place you've been dreading with no hope of getting out."

He tried to think if he'd ever come across that idea before. It did sound like something the Allied Russians he'd talked to would have come up with. "What do you do? When that happens..." 

Pepper's mouth folded for a second, then she shrugged. "Well. Tony would say something about Russian problems and Russian solutions, by which he'd probably want you to think he meant vodka. But I think what really helps it, apart from sleep, of course," she threw him a pointed smile, to which he just gave her a wry shrug and a smile back. None of them were getting much sleep tonight. "Is work." 

"Work, we have. In abundance." Steve pulled himself away from the window and the strange-familiar city. "What do we--"

Noise blared from the speakers hidden around the room. Tony strode in with his arms thrown up and a dramatic swagger in his hips as some kind of rhythmic sound that could almost be called a tune assaulted Steve's ears. Pepper rolled her eyes and produced the remote to turn it down to bearable levels, but he still couldn't figure out what the singer was saying. 

"Oh, come on, that's Black Sabbath. You can't play Black Sabbath at anything less than a dull roar, here, let me show you." 

"No," Pepper held the remote out of his reach. "We have work to do, you can pick up the lessons in classic rock appreciation later. I have a stack of reports with both your names on them..."

Tony groaned. Steve hid a smile and pulled up a chair, letting the music and the loving bickering drown out whichever wolves might linger.


End file.
